Windows Vista User Guide: Applications, Screenshots, Preview, Help, Aero, Sidebar, Microsoft, XP, Server, Linux, Mac

There are many applications in Windows Vista including those mentioned under specific titles in this website. Most of the applications mentioned in this particular page are similar to those included with Windows XP or even earlier versions of Windows. They all have the Vista themes appearance which is fully customizable from the control panel personalization options and have some updates on earlier versions in some cases.

The character map is mostly unchanged. This small application can be opened easily by pening the run command and by typing charmap into the run box or even by typing charmap into the search box in the start menu and running the application that Windows displays. You can also access this by going through the programs folder and then clicking accessories under control panel. The Character Map application is there to display provide a list of character that each font installed in the operating system can display. You can even view special characters towards the bottom half of the character map, these can be displayed in any document or window by following the instructions displayed underneath the Select button when there is an instruction. Usuaully it will display which keystroke to type, for example one character may have 'Keystroke Alt+1234' displayed underneath the Select button, This means that to type this character into a window or document you will have to hold down the Alt button whilst typing those numbers and then releasing the Alt button after the last number.

The command prompt is included with Windows Vista to enable you to use the console to execute commands by typing words or commands. Many of the previous commands work with Vista aswell including newer commands which shall be dsicussed in a more advanced topic. If you wish to view a list of many of the commands available to you, you can type the word help in the console and a list will be displayed, you can also select a command to get more help on by typing help <command> where the word <command> is replaced by the particular command in question. Typing help displays the following list:

Notepad is still included with Windows Vista and there have not been any new visual changes apart from the Aero theme. The benefits of notepad are for plaintext editing or editing of configuration and html files. You can also use notepad for quick notes as it takes up very small amounts of memory and is quick to load. Files saved in .txt format are much smaller than .doc documents also. There are much less features however in notepad, but you can change the global font for notepad so everytime you view a file with it you will see that particular font.

Paintbrush has remained similar too, but with a few additions to make drawing/editing even easier. One tool that you may notice is the color picker tool. This tool is generally available with most graphics packages but has not been included with paintbrush in the past (in Windows XP, etc). It is shown on the screenshot below, to se it just select the particular color that you want to use and then select a tool that you want to use the color.

Another tools that you may find useful that is new to the Vista version of paintbrush is the crop tool. When you select a part of the picture you can right-click on the selected area and select crop which will get rid off anything surrounding the selected area., This is useful for cropping photos or even screenshots:

Sound recorder has become a much simpler program with only 2 distinct features, to start recording and to stop recording. The previous version of sound recorder had a spectrum graph as well as the ability to add a few effects, these have been removed from the sound recorder and now in most versions of Vista the default file format is .wma which can be opened using Windows Media Player 11. The format used to be .wav which was completely uncompressed, now it is compressed at 96kbps compression. There are a few versions of Vista that do not save as a .wma file but instead to .wav - these are the Vista 'N' versions available without Windows Media Player 11, but most versions will come with it.

Windows Calculator is included as the previous versions with Vista. It had not changed visually, and all the functions seem to be the same, you can still open up the scientific calculator or just use the basic mode, you can also run the program using the run command and typing calc or using the search facility.

Wordpad is still included with Windows Vista, it has not undergone any visual changes except for the Aero theme, but you will notice a slight change to formatting options, the Word and Write tab have been removed from the Windows XP version when you open up View, then Options.